Lost and Found
by Fennity
Summary: David leaves home for bigger and better things, and finds that real life exists where he never would've thought. Happiness, sadness, and all things in between. Oh, and lots of slashy boy nonsense. ::amused resignation:: Do enjoy.
1. Prologue

Lost and Found.

By: Fennity

Rating: PG13.

Summary: A couple of years ago, I was a regular on a Newsies slash archive called The Refuge (a fabulous place, BTW), and a forum-goer by the name of Charlie Bird offered up this little gem in a plot-sharing thread:

"_David is a naive rich kid who runs away from home because his father hates him. He narrates the story. Spot and Jack run a circle of __underaged__ male prostitutes. They pimp out Mush, Snitch, and Skittery. Blink is a street fighter who can't let his rep get ruined by his relationship with Mush. Skittery is madly in love with Snitch, who is severly traumatized and views Skittery as nothing more than his brotherly teddy bear. Jack is in love with Spot who claims to be straight. All of them share a crappy, roach-filled apartment. Specs and Dutchy live next door. Specs plays the piano in a seedy bar, Dutchy is a crystal addict and a club kid. I will 3 anyone who writes this forever, because I cannot think of a more angst-filled plot, and I __love__ making my boys angst."_

I believe I started on it that very night, and I've been working at it on-and-off for the past couple years or so. I've changed it a bit, tweaked here and there for purposes of the greater plot, but that's the basis. Thanks CB!

I don't frequent The Refuge anymore, but I'm still flitting around these chapters as I work on other things. Enjoy!

Prologue.

Sometimes, I think my father loves me. He had to have loved me once. I was, a long time ago, his only son, and therefore heir to some amount of obligatory love. I can't remember ever being bounced on his knee, or being played with on the expensive carpet with all varieties of toddler toys, or being taken fishing on foggy mornings. I don't recall any vaguely cliché father-son activities.

But we must have done them. All fathers take their sons fishing, right?

He has taken Les fishing, many times. He had Les's first big catch mounted and hung on the wall in the library, next to his other trophies from countless hunting trips. He thinks it's traditional. I think it's vile. It's part of why I hate sitting in that room, and he knows it.

I never really thought of Les as a rival sibling. He's almost ten years younger than I, after all. Sarah, I could never compete with, her being both the eldest and the only daughter. She follows my mother like a shadow, learning cooking, housemaking, woman things befitting of a good wife. Mom's determined to make Sarah a good wife, for a good husband. Partly because, I think anyway, Mom was raised to be a wife, and if Sarah grows up to be the same, Mom can feel like she measures up, like she accomplished the one female duty that never changes throughout the years.

Needless to say, Mom doesn't spend a lot of time raising me. For eight years, I was my father's child. I think. Like I said, I can't remember being much of a son.

When Les came along, no one expected another baby in the house, least of all my father. You'd think he would've had some idea, but no. The shine in his eyes when he first held Les, I remember that.

I also remember watching Les bounce on his knee, and crawl along with countless toys that I always had to hunt for when he pushed them under furniture or rugs. Sometimes I wondered if my father was trying to make up for time he had lost with me. I was born at a busy period in my family's life. The elegant luxuries we enjoy didn't come free. My father is a hardworking man.

Mom's been telling me that for years, to soothe my injured pride if I get brushed aside or ignored.

"He works hard to provide for us. Don't let it bother you. He's just distracted."

Well, he's been distracted all my life. If not with work, then with Les.

I'm a leftover child.

In the past seven years, he's gotten worse. Lately, it has been pretty bad. If I regretted his distractedness before, I would almost wish it back now. Leftover has shifted to noticeably unwanted.

It started with school. Understand, I've never been a real athletic kid. I'm kind of pale and skinny. I take after my mother. My father, broad-shouldered and tan, sees himself in Les more than me.

But I digress.

I like to read. Not in the library, stared down by dead animals with ratty fur and glassy marble eyes. I read in my room, with the windows open to let in the sun, curled up in my chair with a bottle of Pellegrino or a glass of the iced tea Sarah likes to make. It takes me away. Out of my room. Out of my family's ritzy neighborhood. Out of New York City altogether. I can be whoever I'm not, and while I'm someone else, my father can't touch me, can't ignore me, because then, I'm not his son anymore.

I love to write for the same reasons, only then I can come up with unbelievably complicated revenge plots for sons of scornful fathers.

In my escape, he found my weakness.

He, for lack of a better term, teases me mercilessly about my hobbies. I'm not sporting enough, not cunning enough, not manly enough to be any son of his.

"We already have one Jacobs girl," he would tell my mother when he knew I could overhear. "Yet you have given me two." Mom would swat at him and give an exasperated frown, and then turn to me with apologies in her furrowed brow, silent. She never spoke against him. Sometimes I just pretended not to hear, so she wouldn't feel like she had to say anything in my defense.

Any peculiarity would set him off.

"My son helps his mother _cook?_ Perhaps he wishes to be a decent wife like Sarah."

"You'll never be a man if you don't toughen up and stop hanging on those lousy romance novels."

That's the very mildest. I haven't the heart to put down the worst comments. The way I read and write, it'll be like hearing them all over again.

When I stopped thinking that all fathers always took their sons fishing, I began wondering if all fathers yelled at their sons when they did something differently. Or ridiculed them.

Or hit them.

And then, no one has ever, or will ever, hit me the way my father did.

I gave up on ever being his son the first time he beat me. If he would black my eyes for doing my homework – _doing_ my _homework –_ then I could never be the son he wanted. That son was just not in me. It was like nature saying, 'oops, you guys got mixed up, but here, we'll make it really obvious so something will have to be done.'

I was at my desk, writing, doodling in the margins. Les was in the street, playing catch with his friends. My father's iron punch hit me square in the side of my jaw, and I didn't see it coming. On the floor, I wanted to yell at him, "it's not sissy work, I'm not useless, I'm intelligent, I'm a man, I'm tougher than you could ever be, because look who's lying on the carpet taking every drop of blood knocked out of his nose."

When he finally stood up, he said that no son of his would grow up to be some pansy snob. But that's okay. It was the last hint I would ever need.

He has Les.

Mom has Sarah.

I have myself. And my bruises.

It didn't take much for me to give up. I'm a rational person, and I can recognize a problem easily if presented with a conflicting situation. And it didn't take long for me to decide that I was the odd man, the square peg in the round hole, the piece from a puzzle that somehow got mixed into the box of another. As much as I could never be a son, that man could never be my father.

So I left. That night, too. Quite simply, I stuffed my backpack with some clothes and snuck out. Well, not just my clothes. I took my hidden savings of birthday and Christmas money, my notebook, and a few little things that might be useful: cell phone, my laptop, address book, pocket knife, and a folder of important papers I keep, my passport, that kind of thing. I opened my window, and dropped out into the darkness.

By the way, my name is David Jacobs, and sometimes, I think my father hates me.


	2. Prologue II

**Prologue, Part II.**

I had walked the length of the long alley behind my family's townhouse before I stopped to think whether or not I was actually going to leave. I wondered if anyone had noticed that I was missing yet. I could just as easily slip back into my room without anyone noticing I had left, which would save my mother the worry and my father the task of knocking me senseless after storming after me and dragging me back inside against my will.

But I didn't. I don't think I even looked back. I just went on the way down the road.

If he didn't want me to be his son, then I wouldn't be. Simple as that.

I didn't have any of those idealistic "Just wait until they realize I've gone, then they'll miss me" thoughts. Mom would probably cry, but I think she, before any of the others, would be alright with it. One of the side effects of being an overlooked kid is unbelievable self-reliance, and Mom, from her post on Sarah's shoulder, pretty much had to let me take care of myself all these years.

I don't know if Sarah will care, to be perfectly honest. Men have been coming in and out of her life since she turned 18 – Mom arranged a real debutante party for that, complete with simpering society wives and their promising young lawyer-doctor-banker sons – and she's been raised to deal with it. Les... poor Les. At 10, he's not exactly old enough to understand why I left. He'll be alright, though. Give him another dozen years or so and he'll be recounting the story of his "funny brother" who buggered off in the middle of the night at the holiday dinners.

Now Papa, Papa I was worried about. I imagined that he would react in one of two ways.

For all I knew, he was on the phone that very minute with the Chief of Police, telling him to round me up and to let his boys work me over a little before dragging me home. I didn't know if the police would actually do anything. I am, after all, an adult in the eyes of the state of New York. Papa had sway, though, and enough of it to make me a little wary of going into the city immediately, 19 years old or not.

I hoped he would react the second way, by making some acidic remark to my mother about how the trash had taken itself out for once.

When I reached the end of the street, I stopped. I tried hard to keep from looking back, afraid of either my father storming up behind me, or seeing my house and making a quick run back, I'm not sure which. As ridiculous as it sounds, the diverging road at my feet was literally the only path I had to a new part of my life. I didn't know where I was going to end up. I didn't know how I was going to get there.

But I did know that whatever future I was staring at, down the road and into the distance, it had to be better than all I had left behind.

It was relieving, in a way. I was no longer the leftover child. I wasn't even a child anymore. I was, for the first time in my life... at ease, I guess. For a brief moment there at the corner, no one was judging me or looking down on me. I was happier with myself at that second than I'd ever been in my life.

And that's when I decided for sure: after feeling like that, even for only a few seconds, there's no way I could go home.

But where would I go instead, then?

I took the left-leading street, the one that eventually runs into the busier part of the city. It would be a long walk tomorrow, but if I planned on starting a new life, New York City would be the best place to do it. Millions of immigrants had the same idea, back in the day, and if my great-great-great-great grandfather could come from Hungary with eight bucks to his name and make the Jacobs family into what it is today, then surely I could manage it with an education and a personal bank account.

Papa's had the tendency sometimes to launch into long tirades about how all the Jacobs men before us were rebellious and daring and self-made successes. Well, grandpas Waniszlav, Mayer, David, Francis, William, …Papa,

But not quite yet. It was late, near eleven, and I needed somewhere to go for the night. I mentally kicked myself for not waiting until tomorrow morning to sneak off, when I could have the whole day. As I thought of it, there was a whole list of things I hadn't thought about. Should I go back and get my car? What about school?

Something careless in me made those thoughts disappear.

I came up on the children's park in the neighborhood. It would be a nice, quiet spot to bunk down, just for one night.

As I took off my backpack and laid down on a flat part of the jungle gym, I felt that calm sense in me again, like at the corner.

I would take on the problems tomorrow.

I would make myself a life I could be proud of.


	3. Chapter I

AN: Thanks for the great reviews, ladies and gents! I really appreciate the feedback. Please keep reading! If anyone caught my joke in the last chapter, I tried to be clever and insinuated that David is related to "himself," who had a son named Francis, so maybe something was going on there back in the family tree. Seems like David-the-second is a believer in history repeating itself, so we'll see what happens! O 3O

* * *

**Chapter I.**

People might have all these cute ideas about charming runaway kids and dancing orphans and freedom and all that, but actually _being_ on the streets kind of sucks.

I never did go back to get my car, since I planned on eventually going into the city and I could get around there on foot easily enough. I'm thinking about investing in a good bicycle, actually, since it's not like I have that much to carry around. Must be some kind of post-escape high – for the past few days, I've been in no rush to do anything, just wandering and exploring while gradually getting further away from my neighborhood. I'm kind of a chicken, I guess. Someone with bigger balls would probably get on a plane for Shanghai or something, to really get away from home, but I've always been practical.

Mom's called my cell about a hundred times since I left, leaving messages and begging to know how I am, where I am, how could I do this, don't I love her and Papa, and what on earth was I thinking. I called her back just once and gave her the rehearsed version, that I needed some time on my own away from Papa, that I'm a grown man and should be leaving home soon anyway, that yes, I still love them very much, but this is something I have to do. She seemed to take it pretty well, saying she trusts me and she knows I can take good care of myself and I have a good head on my shoulders. She also told me how Papa took it – that he stomped into my room and threw my desk lamp through the window after he discovered I was missing, then slammed my door shut and locked it.

So I guess I don't have to worry about him coming after me if he's just going to pretend I never existed.

I haven't gone all that far from my old neighborhood yet. It didn't take me very long to realize that I don't have a clue what I'm doing. No car, no job, nowhere to live, and no real college plans on the horizon... so what now? I figure I'm pretty set as far as money is concerned. I've had a sizeable bank account ever since I was old enough to write my name, and I'm not the spendy type to begin with. Still, I won't be renting any SoHo townhouses anytime soon.

I've been wandering around a few streets of shops and diners today. Picked up a newspaper on the corner and flipped through it for cheap apartments. I don't want to spend more nights sleeping in playgrounds or behind stairways. The area around my neighborhood is relatively safe – I've only been pestered once by one poor bum looking for change – but I have no doubt that I won't be so lucky in the rest of the city, so my first concern is a place to stay. On the one hand, I want to get as far away from my house as I can... but on the other, I don't exactly want to wake up with roaches in my bed and a crime scene next door. So I've just been browsing the papers for apartment buildings.

I'm tired of walking. There's a bus stop up ahead. Maybe I'll just see where it takes me.


End file.
